Previews

Red Faction: Guerrilla

Spiffy:

Fine detail evident in the physics model.

Iffy:

Persistence of destruction may hinder immersion as much as it encourages it.

It makes sense that Volition, the developer behind the lurid Saints Row games, would recast the dormant Red Faction series in a sandbox. What's surprising is that it didn't try to design around the shooter's trademark: terrain deformation. To hear the studio's reps tell it, getting deformation right is the specific reason we haven't seen Red Faction in so many years. "We had to wait till technology caught up," says associate producer Sean Kennedy.

Apparently, technology has caught up. THQ has been parading Red Faction: Guerrilla around for a little while now, though not as much as you'd expect a publisher of a high-budget open-world game to. Perhaps this has something to do with the other, recently-released project that Volition had been working on.

Earlier this week, THQ invited us to check out Red Faction: Guerrilla.

Dotted Lines

It's easiest to compare Guerrilla with open-world games similar to Grand Theft Auto, as opposed to something like Assassin's Creed -- that is, ones with sandboxes that you can explore without feeling like you're persistently on probation. Granted, false moves in either example would generate response from Templars and police, but triggers feel more forgiving in GTA. Compare jogging against traffic up a highway on-ramp in Liberty City to running around carelessly on rooftops in Damascus. The former would get you flattened by a pickup amidst cop cars that pay no mind to your odd behavior. The latter would earn you a backful of Crusader arrows the minute you're spotted. It's just harder to get away with odd behavior in Assassin's Creed.

Since so much of the Guerrilla experience seems to involve jacking cars (or tanks, or semis, or mechs...), I was expecting its action to resemble GTA's. But after playing for an hour or so I suspect I may have been wrong. The multi-zoned persistent world (which Kennedy said was twice the size of Stillwater from the first Saints Row) is by default governed by faction-control mechanics. At the outset, everything is controlled by the totalitarian Earth Defense Front. By killing them and destroying their stuff, you gradually degrade their influence in an area, and turn it over to the guerrillas. Think of San Andreas' gang territory mechanics, but wrought bigger. As such, it's hard to really feel that you can go anywhere and go nuts, GTA-style. Or you can, but it'll be like having a five-star wanted level the whole time.

My impression is that this constraint makes sense given the game's structure. Wanton destruction appears to have a consequence; you either alienate civilians by killing them accidentally, or diminish the EDF's dominion by blowing up their structures. It's this element has the potential to make the big-picture game interesting. You can imagine a sense of tentative mastery of the world emerging as your number of "safe" areas increases, while at the same time requiring you to remain mindful of distant zones, since the EDF can capture them back if you're neglectful.